The MIT Alewife Machine: A Large-scale Distributed-memory Multiprocessor

Abstract

The Alewife multiprocessor project focuses on the architecture and design of a large-scale parallel machine. The machine uses a low dimension direct interconnection network to provide scalable communication band-width, while allowing the exploitation of locality. Despite its distributed memory architecture, Alewife allows efficient shared memory programming through a multilayered approach to locality management. A new scalable cache coherence scheme called LimitLess directories allows the use of caches for reducing communication latency and network bandwidth requirements.